Investing is not brain surgery; it can be easy and cheap

“You might be a brain surgeon — but would you operate on your own head?”

That puzzling statement, in a recent Wall Street Journal weekend insert, comes from Eleanor Blayney, consumer advocate for the CFP Board, the group that oversees the courses and standards for Certified Financial Planners.

She isn’t the first person to say it. If the statement sounds familiar, you’ve probably heard it before. I know I have, far too many times.

And that’s why I’m writing this column. I’d like to see the whole brain-surgeon-and-investing thing summarily buried.

Let’s start by being literal. One reason a brain surgeon wouldn’t operate on his or her own head is that anesthesia is generally required for brain surgery.

A surgeon who is asleep, regardless of professional talent, isn’t capable of doing a selfie brain operation.

This entirely reasonable constraint doesn’t apply to managing our own investments. You and I could be in a coma and still manage our investments. Investing isn’t as complicated as brain surgery.

For more than 20 years now, I have been advocating simple index-fund investing, starting with my Couch Potato Portfolio. It is a 50/50 mixture of a major domestic stock index fund and a major domestic bond index fund. The task is to buy equal amounts of each fund, then go away for a year.

Once a year you revive briefly and rebalance, making certain that there are equal amounts invested in each fund. The cost of investing this way is insanely low.

I’m not alone in proposing these simple, low-cost portfolios. MarketWatch columnist Paul Farrell provides regular reports on a variety of “Lazy Portfolios” from other writers or investors who have concluded that index investing is the way to go.

We can do it in very low-cost 401(k) accounts. We can do it in very low-cost taxable accounts. Just as we don’t have to understand metallurgy, electronics and the internal combustion engine to drive our cars, we don’t need advanced training to manage our money.

Is low-cost investing perfect? Sorry, no. But it is good. It is not only better than some, it is better than most.